


Far Too Late

by writingfanatic



Category: Carol (2015), The Price of Salt - Patricia Highsmith
Genre: Alternate Ending, F/F, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-18
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-06-09 05:43:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6892450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writingfanatic/pseuds/writingfanatic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Therese does not go back to the Oak Room, and Carol does not take it well.</p>
<p>WARNING: Suicide. Caution to those for whom this is a trigger warning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Far Too Late

In her unguarded moments, she can feel the cracks spreading. Spider-webs and labyrinths entangling to form chasms at crossings, and if she focuses on it too long, she will no longer begin to see herself as a human being, just an organic structure that is hollowing itself out. Oh god, she feels hollow already. A brief, morbid thought: _Is this how it feels to be dead when your heart still beats?_ But is it beating? 

Her chest pains— _aches_ —for what it has lost…. Yes, she is still living. Yet oh, she feels dead already. She is breaking.  


But she is Carol Aird. She is a woman of elegance and refinement, of perfect manners and smiles even when she feels no joy. She herself is a mask and has a part to play this evening for the friends from the furniture store. They expect the Carol Aird that defines flawless female etiquette, not the trembling husk hiding in the ladies room. They will see that facet of her, her emotions be damned.  


Carol Aird is many things. Woman. Ex-wife. Mother who has given up custody of her child. Buyer for a furniture store. Lonely. Failure in so many roles others wanted her to be, but she is too independent, too aware of her own right to her humanity to be anything less than who she wants to be.  


And what she wanted to be was a person who loved without fear. Society standards be shot to Satan, she was going to give all she had to someone who would see Carol for herself, and for whom Carol would do the same. Someone like Therese. Therese Belivet. Her angel, flung out of space. She loved Therese without fear, at least when she thought she had couldn’t lose Rindy any further. But no, she could continue to lose Rindy, and Carol had to choose between whether to remain a mask, a mere play-character to keep her daughter, or be her true self to keep Therese.  


Carol Aird has no regrets save one: she released Therese.  


And because of this, Therese has released her.  


It is ten to nine now, and Carol must step into character. She is not dramatic by any means, yet she feels as if she has to actually pretend to wear a costume in order to prepare her part. She brings her hands to her face, touching it lightly so as not to muss the makeup as she dons her imaginary mask. It’s a grotesque version of her polite expression, with a carved out mouth curved upward, like the Ancient Greek mask for happy slave characters. Beneath the paper and wax lay her true face, so raw and scarred, it has practically been skinned. _God,_ she thinks, _I am losing my mind._  


Five to nine. She checks herself in the mirror, corrects her makeup as best as she can manage, and rushes to the Oak Room.

 

The dinner itself could be entertaining if she felt anything about it. Carol is perfect in her acting, worthy of an Oscar for how well she is hiding the cracks still spreading within. Robert Fisherman, her supervisor, jokes about her duties and shares stories from when he was in her position. Amy Canterby, her coworker, questions Carol on previous experience, to which Carol indulges her with anecdotes from her old furniture store with Abby. And Eddie LeMaigne, a man from an entirely different area of the store but good friends with the others, is content to listen and provide his opinions only when he is asked.  


It is all a show, and Carol is succeeding. However, now and again, her eyes shift toward the door when the others don’t notice. _If you change your mind…._ Would she?  


A quarter to ten. They are almost finished with their meal. Carol is tired, so exhausted, yet her character does not waver. The show must go on even if that figure standing nearby has the slightest chance of being Therese.  


Wait.  


Could it be?  


No.  


The figure comes closer, and it is not Therese. It is only a stranger, joining her party at a nearby table. Carol takes in a breath and almost forgets to exhale.  


A quarter past eleven. The party disperses. Carol hails a taxi to her apartment, which until now, hoped to call home. Not because she lived there, but rather who lived there with her. Home was a person, now miles away at a party having a wonderful night. Home was no longer an option. She gambled, stripped herself bare, and made herself vulnerable, only to be released. Now she has no home. She has room and board, a place to sleep at night, but it is not, will never be, home.  


She has developed practice in coming back to an empty place. You simply walk in, recognize that you are alone, you breathe, and you breathe and you breathe and you breathe or else you will break. Because you will, ultimately, break. But it will not be tonight.  


But it may be tonight. Without Rindy, the loneliness felt suffocating, as if she were drowning and Rindy were her oxygen. Here, without Therese, without her last chance at happiness, at the hope that the past three and a half months were not in vain, that she had not sacrificed her humanity for nothing, _that her mistake in leaving Therese could be made right_ —without Therese, the loneliness feels crushing. Claustrophobic. Like the room is caving in to compress her until she flattens.  


It is too much. Oh, it is far too much.  


The chasms stretch as the cracks multiply. She feels them below: spider-webs, canyons, fragile glass about to shatter. They hiss with sound of Therese’s name, of Carol’s failure to find happiness on her own terms, of the sound of Carol’s world collapsing around her when no one can carry the blame but herself. They split, scream, and splinter beneath the skin, until at last, as she replays Therese’s answer— _No, I don’t think so._ —her body collapses.  


And Carol Aird _breaks._

 

Carol Aird only exists as a character. There is no mask to take off when she returns to the apartment at night because she _is_ the mask. Her skin absorbed the façade months ago. If it were to become a separate entity again, then there would be nothing left beneath. Under the politesse of this highly-esteemed woman, there is void. The Carol Aird who existed as her own being, who once could have been the lover of Therese Belivet, has faded. What remains is Carol Aird, the stock player. The grinning doll that smiles as it bends its limbs to the orders of its masters. She has forgotten joy, anger, sadness, even love.  


Harge took the deal, but he has made sure that Rindy knows her mother as a degenerate. Her precious girl sees her mother as an outcast, someone to tolerate, and the final blow to the shredded tatters of Carol’s humanity was Carol giving up visits completely. Better her daughter not know her at all than know her as a sodomite. Rindy and Therese have been long gone. Abby faded as well when Carol could no longer find comfort in her support. She pushed her best friend away, and now Carol has no one.  


Not even herself.  


_Is this how it feels to be dead when your heart still beats?_

Who said the heart had to keep beating?  


She is far from dramatic, yet the idea of ripping out her own heart is a pleasant image, and she dwells on it for a while. There is a script, a plan, a scene all playing her head as she reaches inward to obliterate the only proof she has of being alive. She is not losing her mind; she has already gone mad.  


Carol Aird is a walking corpse.  


There is a secret in her closet. Two, in fact. One is a letter, written to a girl long ago who once lay naked in a hotel room as Carol abandoned her. Not the girl in the department store, or the girl she made love to in Waterloo, nor the woman she met at Ritz months later. Only the Therese of that moment, when Carol made the wrong choice. The letter contained apologies, explanations, anything that might have changed that morning.  


The other is a pistol, bought only out of the understanding that she was a single female living alone and plenty of people would happily take advantage of that. Fully loaded.  


Only one bullet will do.  


She downs a rye or two, thankful that in the end she has not run out of cigarettes. “Easy Living” plays in the background; such a beautiful song from a beautiful time. As the song nears its end for the seventh time, Carol finishes her last rye and cigarette, and cocks her gun.  


The last notes play. Carol places the gun against her head, and pauses. She moves the gun lower to her heart. A bit melodramatic, but fitting.  


_Is this how it feels to be dead when your heart still beats?_  


Who said the heart still beat?

\-------

“I saw your picture. You’re getting better, babe.”  


Therese flashes a smile to her partner as Genevieve perused The Times. Gen purchased each copy, cutting out whatever article used a photo Therese had taken. Their living room wall was covered with such articles and was starting to spill into the kitchen. Therese had argued that some should be thrown out, but Gen wouldn’t hear of it.  


“Hey, Therese,” Genevieve calls, a touch of concern in her voice. “What was the name of the woman you used to see? Karen, Cate…”  


“Carol. Aird.”  


“Babe, take a look at this.” Gen passes the paper to Therese, pointing to a certain place.

OBITUARY  
Carolyn “Carol” Ross Aird, aged 34, passed away unexpectedly on Friday, April 16th. Funeral service will be scheduled this Thursday at 2 o’clock at the Madison Avenue Baptist Church. She is survived by her former husband, Hargess Aird, and her daughter, Nerinda Aird. 

Therese tries letting go, tries looking away, but her hands tremble as they keep clutching the paper while her eyes remain fixed on the words, re-reading them until they change, mention some other name she does not recognize—  


“Therese, babe?” Genevieve grabs the paper and tosses it aside. She wraps her arms around Therese, who is now hunched forward, still dumbfounded as she processes the news. 

 

In her unguarded moments, Therese lets herself remember and dwell. A train, hand-built with hand-painted cars. A train ride home from Jersey. A car trip west. A woman, blonde, tall, and regal, whose presence demanded attention wherever she went, coming to her counter to buy a doll, inviting her to lunch and her house one Sunday, then sending her on a train home; a woman who asked her to go west, made love to her in a Waterloo motel, then abandoned her to save the custody of her daughter. Who came back to beg, to start again, and say the most powerful three words she could have uttered in that moment.  


And Therese released her. Just as she had been released a lifetime ago.  


In these moments, Therese lets herself wonder what might have happened had she went to the Oak Room. She and Carol would have started a new relationship, lived together, been happy…. But in that moment, Therese chose to remember the abandonment. She did not learn how to become her own person who lived her own life on her own terms, only to set herself up to be let down by the same woman again. 

She realizes now Carol might never have abandoned her again, but it is too late. Far too late. They released each other, each at separate points in time sacrificed their chance at happiness.  


And now Carol was dead. Suicide.  


In her unguarded, most honest moments, Therese regrets not going back for Carol. When she is not lying to herself, not convincing herself that she made the right choice and that the past year was not full of chances to make it right—when she looks in the mirror to see herself truthfully, she pretends that she is at the Ritz again, and that Carol is front of her once more. This time, there is no Jack. There is only time itself, stretched out before them like the perpetual sunrise Carol had promised her. Time for Therese to stare back into Carol’s eyes as Carol whispers. Time for her to reply.  


“I love you, too.”  


But it is too late. Far too late.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Constructive criticism is welcome as long as you're nice and polite about it (snarky comments will be deleted). Also, I understand that this ending goes completely against what made the book groundbreaking for its time, but I was curious about what would have happened if the ending wasn't so happy. I will still apologize if hearts were broken. Thanks again!


End file.
